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Just a couple of weeks ago, I was sharing this sweet message singer T-Pain wrote about his wife and how they stay up all night watching cat videos. It was precious. So when I saw that The ShadeRoom was featuring the couple as “Baewatch,” I was interested to see what he had to say this time.

But unlike the first piece, it wasn’t as heartwarming. In a comment under his wife, Amber Najm’s post, T-Pain wrote:

I literally read this post smiling for the first half and then, after it escalated the way it did, frowning, utterly disturbed.

There are so many things here. It’s truly heartbreaking that so often we see men celebrate women, it begins with him extolling her for enduring all the pain he caused. But since that’s all too common, I could get past that.

What was harder to swallow was the violence he “jokingly” endorsed toward the end of it.

“If I catch you with another n*gga I’m gonna kill both of y’all with a deadly weapon for sure but I’ll leave you for last because I’m a f*ck*n gentleman.”

Hmm.

After the post caught the flack it deserved, T-Pain offered this explanation on his own Instagram page.

 

https://www.instagram.com/p/BhZ3esVj_tL/?hl=en&taken-by=tpain

 

“If you dumb ass, stupid ass, can’t keep a man, can’t get f*ck*d right ass b*tches think I’m doing anything f*cked up to my wife, mentally or physically, please go find a d*ck to suck because that is the dumbest sh*t I ever heard in my f*cking life. My wife ain’t one of them Instagram b*tches so she ain’t going to be on all day, answering your comments and all that bullsh*t. I got time gotdammit. Only thing I’m doing to my wife is tearing that p*ssy up, just how she like it, just when she want it. Any post that she makes, I always do some endearing a$$ sh*t and then just throw a wrench right at the end. Anybody who knows this, that knows me and my wife. That’s the kind of f*cking relationship we got. But you got actual n*ggas on video beating up they b*tches and y’all still buying they sh*t so leave me the f*ck alone. Go find something else to do. F*ck ya, bye.”

While I would hope and many of us would assume that he’s just joking, that fate is a reality for too many women in real life.

It’s strange that to love someone, men too often feel like they have to possess them. And the woman’s decision to be with another man can only be met with violence.

Surely you’ve noticed a recurring pattern of anger and rage being the range of acceptable emotions for men to publicly display. This little narrative falls right in line with that.

Then to add insult to injury, T-Pain equates this violent and dysfunctional behavior with love.

It reminds me of the “joke” Lil Duval made about the hypothetical situation of discovering that one of his romantic partners were trans. Or the “joke” Tracy Morgan made when he said he would kill his son if he were gay.

Jokes that “punch down” at marginalized communities, women and the LGBT community, from men who enjoy more privilege generally fall flat. Particularly when these instances, which these men have described, happen so often.

There is no shortage of stories about women who have been killed by “jealous” male partners, like the man who killed his ex-fiancé when she attempted to return the engagement ring.

Just the other day, Crissle, from The Read podcast, told a story about a man commissioning his girlfriend to rape his 11-year-old autistic son because he believed his son was going to be gay.

Black Trans women are at extreme risk of dying violent deaths.

When these types of tragedies happen every day, when there is evidence of their impact, joking like this in a public forum, just doesn’t seem appropriate. Since people fail to see the harm when people make light of women’s issues, think about it like this. If a White man were to write a letter to his Black girlfriend jokingly saying he was going to call the cops on her brother to have the police kill him, we could plainly see how that would be wrong. The pain is too real, it’s too prevalent and too present to disregard as all fun and games.

These types of jokes lend credence or make light of the horrors of the world. And whether T-Pain and his wife play like that or not, he should have kept it off of the internet for the world to see.

Veronica Wells is the culture editor at MadameNoire.com. She is also the author of “Bettah Days” and the creator of the website NoSugarNoCreamMag. You can follow her on Facebook and on Instagram and Twitter @VDubShrug.
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